A World of Change

I know that it has been some time since I last posted. I keep looking at that last post and think how much the world has changed in the intervening twenty months.

In March of last year we knew that a General Election was imminent for the UK and also it was election year for the US.  At that time it was not clear when a General Election would be called in the UK, but the date of the US presidential election is fixed in stone.While the US election could have gone either way at that point, it was looking increasingly clear in the UK that the current Conservative government was likely to lose to the opposition Labour party.

So, it was not a great surprise when in the UK the Labour party won the General Election by a large, but shallow majority - meaning that many of the victorious Labour MPs won their seats by only a handful of votes. Consequently it won't take much of a swing away from Labour for them to loose their seats at the next election.

In the US the presidential election was won by the Republican candidate Donald Trump, beating the Democrat Kamala Harris. American politics are very different from those in the UK and I think that on this side of the Atlantic we watched with some amazement at the way in which the campaign unfolded there.

In France Macron clings on and in Italy Giorgia Meloni remains as prime minister, while in Germany Olaf Scholz has been has been replaced by Friedrich Merz. And after the death of Pope Francis, the Vatican also has a new man in charge - Pope Leo XIV. Quite a lot of change in a short time.

After a worldwide period of relative stability, recently there as been a tremendous amount of turmoil, with the wars in Gazza and Ukraine causing many of the international problems. Interventions to try to put a halt to these conflicts are being met with resistance by the aggressors and lives continue to be lost.

Away from these conflict,  politics in the US appears to have become divisive and feudal. One of my university friends who is British, married an American and moved to the US. Now she is afraid to come home to the UK in case she won't be allowed to return to the US. Never mind the tariffs and the trade wars that have dominated the world economy this year.

In the UK the unpopular Labour government has been mired in scandals almost from the day that they came to power. Initially there was the who ha over MPs, including the prime minister Keir Starmer, receiving gifts and hospitality from donors. More recently the deputy prime minister Angela Rayner had to resign over her dubious property dealings.

Yesterday we had the delights of the annual budget. Much of which had been leaked in advance. But after weeks of speculation over what the budget would contain, the event itself proved not to hold many surprises. The reception of the budget has been mixed, but overall the verdict is a thumbs down.

And so the world continues to rotate and life goes on.